Classical Music

BEETHOVEN: SINFONIE NR. 5/TRIP

2018 release. Since 1939, the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert has become a tradition and the world's most famous classical music event. The list of names of leading conductors who have led the Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concerts reads like a veritable who's who of great maestros: Herbert von Karajan, Lorin Maazel, Claudio Abbado and Gustavo Dudamel to name a few. For the New Year's Concert 2018 world-renowned conductor Riccardo Muti returns to conduct the New Year's Concert for the fifth time. He has conducted the Vienna Philharmonic for over 500 concerts, has a very close connection to the orchestra and is one of the most engaged New Year's Concert conductors. Italian conductor Muti holds two music directorships: the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestra Giovanile Luigi Cherubini. A prolific recording artist, Muti has received dozens of honors, titles, awards and prizes throughout his career. The Vienna Philharmonic's New Year's Concert is unique and has often been imitated, but not equaled, with a live broadcast on television in over 90 countries around the world with over 40 million viewers. The repertoire for the New Year's Concert features works by members of the Strauss Family - Johann Strauss, father and son, as well as Eduard and Josef Strauss. Old favorites from their works are played alongside others that have never been recorded or are rarely heard. All of them programmed around two fixed points in the concert, The Blue Danube Waltz and the Radetzky March.

Issued by Kudu in '71, this crucial soul-jazz LP spent decades out of print. Backed by a rhythm section featuring Billy Cobham, Ron Carter and Airto, Lonnie's organ and clavinet and Grover Washington Jr..'s sax do battle on Mama Wailer; Hola Muneca; I Feel the Earth Move, and the amazing epic Stand !

MOZART IN-BETWEEN

The German Romantic classics - Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler - had been central to Bruno Walter's middle years, but his life-long devotion to Mozart grew in his “post-retirement” days, beginning in 1958.

From 1958 to 1961, he recorded 55 works in the reverberant acoustic of Hollywood's American Legion Auditorium. Only the chorale finale of Beethoven's Ninth proved unsatisfactory, so Walter made one more trip to New York, this time with an East Coast version of the Columbia Symphony and the Westminster Symphonic Choir.

This box set of stereo recordings - with remasterings previously released in Bruno Walter - The Complete Columbia Album Collection - brings together some of the most treasured symphonic works of Mozart and Haydn, including two of Mozart's violin concertos played by the great French virtuoso Zino Francescatti.

Inspired by the idea of 'music of the spheres' and the interaction between space and men, the album reflects Sumino's multi-faceted artistry and melts old and new music into one unique listening experience. The album includes an intriguing variety of music recorded on concert grant and upright piano and ranges from Baroque to Romanticism (Bach, Purcell, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy); includes iconic film and contemporary composers such as Hans Zimmer and Ryuichi Sakamoto, plus Hayato's own arrangements of popular works such as Ravel's "Bolero" and Mozart's "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Five of Hayato's own unique compositions appear, including melodic and relaxing solo piano tracks, perfect for streaming and playlisting. "Human Universe" musically explores the idea of "Music of the Spheres", a concept that traces back to the ancient Greeks, who believed that celestial bodies in the universe emitted sound bringing music and harmony.

For the first time ever, Sony Classical is issuing a complete collection of the recordings made for RCA Victor by the fabled Austrian cellist Emanuel Feuermann with 11 works for the first time on CD transferred from the original master discs.

The set comes with new liner notes by violin expert John Maltese as well as photos and facsimiles from the private archives of cellist Marika Hughes, granddaughter of Emanuel Feuermann.

In his tragically short career – mainly in Germany, until the Nazi regime dismissed him from his position at the Berlin conservatory in 1933, and in the US, where he emigrated five years later – Feuermann took the art of cello playing to new heights. Eugene Ormandy declared that his cello revealed to the conductor what music really means. In the words of American critic-pianist-composer Jed Distler, “Feuermann had everything: an intense, focused tone that sings with expressive economy, controlled warmth, centered intonation, a smooth yet variegated bow arm, one of the most adroit left hands in the business (what effortless double stops!), unswerving integrity, and impeccable taste.” “Anything he played he engraved in your memory,” wrote musicologist Richard Taruskin.

Feuermann made some celebrated recordings in Germany and England, but it is the post-emigration albums for RCA on which his iconic reputation largely rests. Produced in New York, Philadelphia and Hollywood between 1939 and 1941, the year before he died at the age of only 39 (the result of negligence during a routine operation) – they include the Brahms Double Concerto (with violinist Jascha Heifetz) and Strauss’s Don Quixote, both with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy; and Bloch’s Schelomo with the Philadelphians under Leopold Stokowski.

Feuermann’s benchmark RCA chamber music catalogue comprises Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart and Brahms piano trios with Heifetz and Rubinstein; a Beethoven string duo and a Dohnányi string trio with Heifetz and viola great William Primrose; as well as a host of duo recordings – some never before issued at all – with the outstanding German-American pianist Franz Rupp (accompanist of Fritz Kreisler and singers from Lotte Lehmann and Beniamino Gigli to Marian Anderson), including Mendelssohn’s Second Cello Sonata and shorter works and transcriptions ranging from Bach and Handel to Fauré and Canteloube.

[This] record has a considerable extra in Falla's Harpsichord Concerto. This dry but oddly attractive work is admirably played by Kipnis with leading members of the NYPO. Their performance is excellent. Boulez understands this sort of work completely and directs an admirable performance.

-- Gramophone [8/1976]
reviewing the original LP release of the Falla Concerto

A swift and nimble account of Beethoven's 2nd Concerto paired with a fiery Bach D minor Concerto, showing how Gould could be far more animated live than in the studio.

The "Fourth Programme" of Sony Classical's Glenn Gould Edition contributes to the Beethoven deluge with a swift and nimble account of the Second Concerto, recorded live in Leningrad in 1957 (SMK52686). Ladislav Slovak conducts, and the coupling is a fiery Bach D minor Concerto—which is far more animated than Gould's studio version under Bernstein.

-- Gramophone [11/1993]


The [Beethoven] Second Concerto, which to my knowledge has only previously been released on Melodiya, is something very unique. Not only is the recording taken from a live concert (Gould gave up public performance in 1964), but it presents playing of consummate artistry in a work that often receives condescending attention from critics. But be warned—the orchestral playing, especially the strings, is dreadful. It is Gould's spontaneity in colouring the writing in different registers, in treating fast passages with an unmannered expressivity (where most pianists rattle off figurations)— in a word, his 'musicality'—that make this a memorable reading. There may be no real sense of peace in the Adagio, where Gould's sensuous use of piano tone is much to the fore, but the finale has an infectious humour that demonstrates how different was his playing in concert, as opposed to the recording studio.

-- Gramophone [9/1986]
reviewing the Beethoven concerto on LP, issued as part of CBS Masterworks 39036

In 2015, Sony Classical reissued Die Walküre and Siegfried from the first digital recording of the Ring. “It has stood the test of time remarkably well”, observed ClassicsToday.com when the complete set, originally released in 1983, was last reissued. “The Staatskapelle Dresden plays spotlessly for Marek Janowski … An excellent ‘Ring’ experience.” Now the remaining two music dramas from this acclaimed cycle are again available separately. Gramophone in 1997 praised the “marvellously clean, spacious digital recording” and “Janowski’s fast, lyrical, wholly cogent reading [which] has the Dresden Staatskapelle playing with the utmost beauty from start to finish – try the start of Act 3 of Götterdämmerung – and with lean power when that’s called for … Voices and players are in an ideal relationship, which is not say that such [orchestral] passages as the Rhine Journey and Funeral March want anything in visceral excitement … Matti Salminen is a commanding, often subtle Hagen … The smaller parts, especially Rhinemaidens led by Lucia Popp, are well taken …

This reissue is part of the first digital recording of Wagner’s Ring cycle which was released originally in 1983 and was conducted for Marek Janowski. The Staatskapelle Dresden is the performing ensemble for this recording, playing brilliantly for Janowski, who is a masterful Wagner interpreter. Gramophone wrote in 1997 of this recording, “Die Walkure introduces us to Jessye Norman’s involving Sieglinde and the youthful Siegfried Jerusalem’s near-ideal Siegmund, forthright and sincere, not forgetting Kurt Moll’s granite Hunding. Theo Adam [as Wotan] is so authoritative, so keen with the text, so inside his part…”

On the 150th anniversary of the birth of Charles Ives - acclaimed by his champion Leonard Bernstein as the "first great American composer", who, "all alone in his Connecticut barn, created his own private musical revolution" - Sony Classical presents the most authoritative recording collection ever released of works by this eccentric, prophetic genius.

The 5-CD box set Charles Ives - The Anniversary Edition is a unique and provocative introduction only released previously 50 years ago on LP by Columbia Masterworks under the art direction of Henrietta Condak to celebrate Ives's centenary.

The first disc examines "The Many Faces of Charles Ives" through eight diverse works recorded between 1964 and 1970: Bernstein conducts the New York Philharmonic in The Fourth of July and The Unanswered Question; General William Booth Enters into Heaven, one of Ives's towering achievements, and The Circus Band are performed by the Gregg Smith Singers; baritone Thomas Stewart sings the moving song In Flanders Fields; organist E. Power Biggs plays Ives's Variations on "America"; composer Gunther Schuller conducts The Pond for chamber orchestra; and the Largo cantabile Hymn is performed by the New York String Quartet and double bass player Alvin Brehm. CD 2, "The Celestial Country", offers Ives's early cantata by that name, composed in 1897-99 for his conservative Yale composition teacher Horatio Parker. It is sung by the Gregg Smith Singers (accompanied by the Columbia Chamber Orchestra), who also perform arrangements of four of Ives's most powerful patriotic songs with the American Symphony Orchestra and Leopold Stokowski conducting. "The Things Our Fathers Loved", CD 3, contains 25 of Ives's songs, delivered by the soprano Helen Boatwright, who specialized in American song. She is partnered by John Kirkpatrick, who studied and worked closely with Ives and is still regarded as the most authoritative interpreter of his piano music. Gramophone in 1974 praised this famous recording as "the finest selection ever to appear" on LP of "what may well turn out to be considered his most important, characteristic and consistently inspired body of music."

Mao Fujita follows up his 'acclaimed' debut album on Sony Classical, the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas, with a similarly ambitious recording project, 'Preludes'; three complete sets of 24 preludes by Chopin, Scriabin, and 20th century Japanese composer Akio Yashiro. This album represents a fascinating exploration of three different but intricately connected worlds, each full of poetic diversity, volcanic energy and atmospheric stillness. Each of these three sets are in perfect symmetry with each other, each containing 24 short preludes, one for each major and minor key. But it is Chopin's preludes that form the axis around which these other two sets of preludes orbit. Chopin's Preludes, Op. 28 (1839) broke all expectations of the term 'prelude', elevating the form from small, often-improvised, introductory pieces to singular works in their own right, and in this Op. 28 set, presented as a spinning constellation of self-contained ideas and emotions, and some of the most enduring and loved piano pieces in the repertoire. Scriabin's Preludes, Op. 11 (1888-96) echo Chopin's set in so many ways - the number of preludes, the ordering of the keys, the concept of the prelude as a short, but significant work - but is certainly no copy, rather more a descendant, an extension, hyper expressive, each prelude an intricate miniature world of it's own. The third set of preludes is perhaps the most intriguing. A world premier recording of the 24 Preludes (1945) by Japanese composer Akio Yashiro. Taking Chopin's model even further, Yashiro creates a highly idiomatic and original work, written when only 15 years old. This is the most personal work on the album for Mao Fujita, with a relationship to the composer's widow, and presenting the work for the first time as a commercial studio recording. Or as Mao puts it, "the Chopin and the Scriabin are the fish and the rice, the base, but the Yashiro is the wasabi, just as vital, and that special kick to create something delicious."

With this open-air concert in Sch�nbrunn, the Vienna Philharmonic wishes to provide all Viennese, as well as visitors to the city, with a special musical experience in the impressive setting of Sch�nbrunn Palace and it's beautiful baroque gardens, a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage Site. - Since 2004 the Vienna Philharmonic has provided an outstanding experience for the audience. In the recent years the orchestra has been conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, Valery Gergiev, Franz Welser-M�st, Daniel Barenboim, Christoph Eschenbach, Zubin Mehta and Andris Nelsons. Among the previous guest soloists were: Ren�e Fleming, Lang Lang, Rudolf Buchbinder, Katia and Marielle Lab�que, Yuja Wang, Jonas Kaufmann, Igor Levit, Gautier Capu�on and Elina Garanca. It is Sony Classical�s 12th release of the Summer Night Concert.